Biblio

The presence of robots is becoming more apparent as technology progresses and the market focus transitions from smart phones to robotic personal assistants such as those provided by Amazon and Google. The integration of robots in our societies is an inevitable tendency in which robots in many forms and with many functionalities will provide services to humans. This calls for an understanding of how humans are affected by both the presence of and the reliance on robots to perform services for them. In this paper we explore the effects that robots have on humans when a service is performed on request. We expose three groups of human participants to three levels of service completion performed by robots. We record and analyse human perceptions such as propensity to trust, competency, responsiveness, sociability, and team work ability. Our results demonstrate that humans tend to trust robots and are more willing to interact with them when they autonomously recover from failure by requesting help from other robots to fulfil their service. This supports the view that autonomy and team working capabilities must be brought into robots in an effort to strengthen trust in robots performing a service.

A recent study featuring a new kind of care robot indicated that participants expect a robot's ethical decision-making to be transparent to develop trust, even though the same type of `inspection of thoughts' isn't expected of a human carer. At first glance, this might suggest that robot transparency mechanisms are required for users to develop trust in robot-made ethical decisions. But the participants were found to desire transparency only when they didn't know the specifics of a human-robot social interaction. Humans trust others without observing their thoughts, which implies other means of determining trustworthiness. The study reported here suggests that the method is social interaction and observation, signifying that trust is a social construct. Moreover, that `social determinants of trust' are the transparent elements. This socially determined behaviour draws on notions of virtue ethics. If a caregiver (nurse or robot) consistently provides good, ethical care, then patients can trust that caregiver to do so often. The same social determinants may apply to care robots and thus it ought to be possible to trust them without the ability to see their thoughts. This study suggests why transparency mechanisms may not be effective in helping to develop trust in care robot ethical decision-making. It suggests that roboticists need to build sociable elements into care robots to help patients to develop patient trust in the care robot's ethical decision-making.

Trust is an important topic in medical human-robot interaction, since patients may be more fragile than other groups of people. This paper investigates the issue of users' trust when interacting with a rehabilitation robot. In the study, we investigate participants' heart rate and perception of safety in a scenario when their arm is led by the rehabilitation robot in two types of exercises at three different velocities. The participants' heart rate are measured during each exercise and the participants are asked how safe they feel after each exercise. The results showed that velocity and type of exercise has no significant influence on the participants' heart rate, but they do have significant influence on how safe they feel. We found that increasing velocity and longer exercises negatively influence participants' perception of safety.

The growing diffusion of robotics in our daily life demands a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of trust in human-robot interaction. The performance of a robot is one of the most important factors influencing the trust of a human user. However, it is still unclear whether the circumstances in which a robot fails to affect the user's trust. We investigate how the perception of robot failures may influence the willingness of people to cooperate with the robot by following its instructions in a time-critical task. We conducted an experiment in which participants interacted with a robot that had previously failed in a related or an unrelated task. We hypothesized that users' observed and self-reported trust ratings would be higher in the condition where the robot has previously failed in an unrelated task. A proof-of-concept study with nine participants timidly confirms our hypothesis. At the same time, our results reveal some flaws in the design experimental, and encourage a future large scale study.

Automatic emotion recognition using computer vision is significant for many real-world applications like photojournalism, virtual reality, sign language recognition, and Human Robot Interaction (HRI) etc., Psychological research findings advocate that humans depend on the collective visual conduits of face and body to comprehend human emotional behaviour. Plethora of studies have been done to analyse human emotions using facial expressions, EEG signals and speech etc., Most of the work done was based on single modality. Our objective is to efficiently integrate emotions recognized from facial expressions and upper body pose of humans using images. Our work on bimodal emotion recognition provides the benefits of the accuracy of both the modalities.